Everybody loves thrillers lately. With hit mini-series like “Run Away” and “His & Hers” making waves on Netflix already this yr, it is smart that the published networks would attempt to reclaim a few of their misplaced viewers by giving them the type of anti-hero that was once reserved for cable TV. The most recent such effort is an adaptation of a Belgian movie/novel named “De Zaak Alzheimer,” the story of an murderer with Alzheimer’s who’s making an attempt to do one final job earlier than dementia overtakes him. If that idea sounds oddly acquainted, it was not too long ago tailored into the dismally terrible Liam Neeson car “Reminiscence,” one of many lesser movies from a star who generally makes questionable selections. Have builders Ed Whitmore & Tracey Malone, and showrunners Aaron Zelman & Glenn Kessler, cracked the story in a manner that makes it price remembering week after week?
“Gray’s Anatomy” star Patrick Dempsey steps into the tailor-made fits of Angelo Ledda, an bizarre man in a single half of his life and a employed killer within the different. He’s satisfied everybody in his “regular” life, together with his very pregnant daughter Maria (Odeya Rush) and son-in-law Jeff (Daniel David Stewart), that he’s only a suburban everyman with a boring job and easy life. What Maria doesn’t know is that his work journeys to town should not for gross sales pitches as a lot as cold-blooded murders. Within the premiere, he units up in a sniper place on his goal, solely to must improvise when the sufferer doesn’t take the window seat as predicted. He’s arrange as a personality who has maintained twin lives, though there’s a robust suggestion that the harmful one may need led to the loss of life of his spouse, Maria’s mom.
We meet just a few different individuals in Angelo’s sphere within the first two episodes, together with the person who offers him his assignments (Michael Imperioli) and that man’s nephew (Richard Harmon), who serves as Angelo’s right-hand man, though one of many points with the present is that this program and its universe feels surprisingly contained and even slight. There’s too little world-building, nearly no setup for Angelo as a personality exterior of his descriptors like “murderer,” “father,” and “affected person.” That final one surfaces when it turns into clear that Angelo is beginning to succumb to the dementia that has pressured his brother right into a situation the place he barely even acknowledges him. When he can’t keep in mind the alarm code on his New York condominium, that’s a small drawback; when he places his gun within the fridge as a substitute of his protected, that’s a giant one.
In fact, judging a weekly community sequence after two episodes is a little bit of a folly in that “Reminiscence of a Killer” might discover its persona mid-season and reveal these chapters to be simply rising pains. I’ve my doubts. There are basically lazy points to those episodes that really feel like pervasive points that may’t be simply overcome. Most of all, the writing is uninspired, with clunky dialogue and character particulars that don’t actually inform us something about who we’re watching or what they’re doing. And whereas the premiere is well-made sufficient—directed by the good TV vet Daniel Minahan, who additionally helmed final yr’s underrated “On Swift Horses”—the follow-up is depressingly visually flat. There’s a shootout round a pool that is without doubt one of the most haphazardly edited issues I’ve seen in a very long time, as if somebody is making an attempt to cover that they didn’t get the best protection.
The novice craft of a scene like that wouldn’t matter if we cared about what was occurring. And whereas it’s tempting to say, “give it time,” two episodes of community TV is concerning the size of a characteristic movie, and we’ve all seen reveals that get their hooks in you from bounce. To be truthful, if this present does find yourself working, the arrival of the good Gina Torres (“Firefly”) within the second episode because the cop who begins to smell round Angelo’s life after a capturing will probably be one of many foremost causes. However will anyone care by that time? With a lot competitors on the market, it feels more and more tough to evangelise endurance with a present that has so little persona. In spite of everything, first impressions are sometimes all that we keep in mind.
Two episodes screened for overview. Premieres on January 25, 2026.
